


poppies steeped in slumber

by refusals



Series: give lilies with full hands [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Consent Issues, M/M, Past Sexual Abuse, Past Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-09
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 11:47:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2427563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/refusals/pseuds/refusals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The worst part is how the only thing Steve can do is watch.</p><p>(aka snippets of "Lilies With Full Hands" from Steve's POV, though it's not necessary to read that as long as you get the gist of the <a href="http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/19023.html?thread=44343887#t44343887">original prompt</a>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is basically a companion piece to "lilies" from steve's pov, meant more as a collection of snapshots rather than a cohesive story. also known as "lilies with full hands: all the hurt with little to none of the comfort, now with extra bonus unreliable narrator!" 
> 
> thanks to [ashcat](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ashcat/pseuds/ashcat) for the idea, which i have so impulsively taken and run with despite being hella nervous about never having written from steve's pov :S
> 
> title from virgil, again, to go with the theme of flowers and also because i have no imagination.
> 
> as always, please heed the warnings in the tags.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> additional warning in this chapter for mentions of vomiting and some suicidal ideation.

 

When he sees Bucky standing beneath a tree on the National Mall a stone’s throw away from the Smithsonian just like he said he’d be, Steve’s very first instinct is to touch him.

He actually has to jam his hands into his pockets to keep himself from reaching out and running them all across Bucky’s body, just to make sure it’s him, that he’s real and he’s here and he’s _alive_.

“He’s gonna be jumpy as hell,” Sam had warned him. “Don’t touch him without asking first.”

Steve really didn’t need to be told. He’d read what they’d done to Bucky in those HYDRA files (and proceeded to vomit until he couldn’t move). He wouldn’t be surprised if Bucky never wanted to be touched again.

He suddenly thinks back to when he first met Sam, Sam leaning against a tree wheezing for breath as Steve made good-naturedly snide comments about the other man’s fitness, and while he’s not really one for signs and portents, he can’t help but to notice the parallels between then and now.

One of the most valued friendships in Steve’s life began beneath a tree on the National Mall.

Maybe it wasn’t the last.

It pains Steve to think about it that way, though. To think about whatever might come out of this encounter with Bucky as a new beginning as opposed to an inevitable continuation following a momentary lapse. To the rest of the world it’s been seventy years, but for Steve... He still remembers the last birthday he celebrated with Bucky, remembers the way Bucky smelled when he came home from a long day at the factory, how he looked when he was asleep.

He can still hear Bucky’s scream trailing after him down that snowy mountainside in the Austrian Alps.

Some nights Steve wakes in a tangle of sweat-drenched sheets with an aching pinch in his arm from stretching it farther than it will allow, grappling for a hold on some desperate impossibility that he can’t even achieve in his dreams, because once again his body is not enough.

When he got the serum, he thought his body would never fail him again.

He was wrong.

“I’m never going to be him,” Bucky mumbles, instantly bringing Steve’s attention snapping back to the present.

Steve very nearly blurts out _don’t say that_ , but realises that he’s being put to the test right now, somehow, and that answer would most definitely mean he’d fail.

He just doesn’t want to admit that Bucky could very well be right. It’s certainly hard for Steve to come up with any viable counterpoints when the person standing before him right now is hardly a person at all, let alone the vibrant, charmingly cocksure young man that was once his closest friend.

He looks haunted and hunted and tense, so unlike any version of Bucky that Steve has ever seen.

Bucky before the war was all wry smiles and carefully-constructed aplomb that masked a slew of insecurities that he’d sometimes mumble about to Steve if he got drunk enough. Bucky after he’d been freed from Zola’s clutches in 1943 was quieter, harder, maybe even a little meaner, but still trying so very hard to be okay and still so unremittingly _Bucky_. Hell, even Bucky as the Winter Soldier was more familiar in some fucked-up way, because at least the Winter Soldier had retained Bucky’s sense of hunger and purpose.

But the person standing before him right now? He’s a stranger, and Steve realises with a sick start that the reason for this is because this is the very first time Steve has ever seen Bucky with all the fight sucked out of him.

He is a ghost, just like Natasha said, but not in the same way that she meant – not in the sense that he’s that lethal spectre that seems to appear and vanish within the same breath, leaving untraceable trails of death and altered history behind it. No, right now Bucky is a ghost in the way that he is not quite dead, but definitely not alive, either, and Steve has a feeling that whatever he says next will make all the difference as to which side of the veil he chooses to stay on.

Very carefully, Steve says, “That’s okay.”

Bucky just stares vacantly at him.

“It’s okay,” Steve repeats in a low, steady voice. “You... you don’t have to be... him. You don’t have to be anyone. You can just be who-... whoever you want.”

He literally holds his breath as he waits for Bucky’s response, watching Bucky’s face attentively and feeling deeply unsettled when he realises he has no idea what’s going on in Bucky’s head. It used to be that a fleeting shared glance or a soft nudge on the shoulder was all it took for them to come to some unspoken plan or agreement. They could interpret each other’s eyes like scripture, read each other’s bodies like palms.

Where their lifelines were once perfectly overlapping, they are now split and severed, diverging into separate perilous trails.

Now, as Steve scours Bucky’s blank face and bristling body for some kind of hint as to what he’s feeling, it’s like looking into a black hole.

Finally, Bucky says, “Okay.”

 

* * *

 

When they get to the apartment, Bucky will not allow Steve to enter it until he’s swept the area for threats. Steve doesn’t try to protest despite the way his heart feels like an anvil in his chest, just watches from the doorway as Bucky ducks in and out of every room, making sure they’re all clear before he finally returns to Steve and gives him a curt nod.

Steve walks in and waits for Bucky to move, too, because he’s not exactly thrilled with the idea of having his back to Bucky, but Bucky merely stands there like a wall fixture, clearly waiting for the same thing.

As subtly he can, Steve angles himself ever so slightly so that he can keep Bucky in the corner of his peripheral vision as he walks to the living room, where he sits down on the couch and finally realises just how fucking shaky he is. He doesn’t think he’d have been able to remain on his own two feet for much longer.

Bucky, on the other hand, has found a standing spot in the corner of the room that grants him a clear line of sight to both doors and the window.

“Bucky?” Steve tries.

Nothing.

Steve desperately wants to call Natasha for help, or maybe Sam, but it feels like a betrayal, somehow, to bring anyone else into the picture when Bucky is like this. The Bucky that Steve knew would’ve hated having an audience to his most vulnerable moments.

Eventually, Steve just asks, “Are you hungry?”

Bucky does not respond other than a brief flickering of his eyes in Steve’s direction.

“I can, um, make you something,” Steve says, well aware that he’s babbling. “D’you... You still like clam chowder? I have a few cans; I could make you a pot if you’d like...? Or something else? You... You really look like you could use something to eat.”

Once it becomes pretty clear that he won’t be getting an answer, Steve decides to make the soup anyway. He heads to the kitchen, walking slowly, carefully, unable to keep himself from feeling apprehensive even though Bucky has displayed no signs of aggression towards him, and he feels guilty for thinking that Bucky might hurt him.

When he hears barely-there footsteps behind him, he turns around, perhaps too quickly, because Bucky also takes a sudden step backward.

“You can wait in the living room if you’d like, maybe sit down,” Steve says softly, because, quite frankly, Bucky looks like he’s about to tip over.

“No,” is all Bucky says.

Steve eyes him a moment longer before he shrugs and continues towards the cupboard where the canned soup is. Every sound in the kitchen feels amplified by the silence between them, from the creaking of the pantry door to the groan of the can opener.

Bucky positions himself a few metres away from Steve, where he has a clear view of the door, and Steve can’t shake the odd suspicion that Bucky is doing this for _him_. Sure, Sam’s taught Steve about hypervigilance, and Bucky is the very picture of someone on excessively high alert, but his proximity to Steve as well as the fact that Steve is not within Bucky’s main line of vision suggests that he does not view Steve as a threat so much as something to be guarded.

Steve does not touch him.

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t take long for Steve to realise that Bucky is not a threat, but that’s mostly just because Bucky’s not much of anything, really.

He doesn’t sleep, doesn’t wash himself. Steve initially thinks he can’t even relieve himself properly, but quickly learns that Bucky wetting the bed that first night was just an unfortunate accident. He doesn’t eat unless he’s told to, and more often than not he cannot register his nausea quickly enough to get himself to the sink or toilet before his stomach stages a violent protest against its new contents. Even once his system reacclimates itself to processing different foods and Steve consequently starts to prepare him more exciting meals, Bucky consumes everything with all the pleasureless obligation of a joyless but necessary task.

Steve doesn’t know what to do.

He calls Natasha, who is overseas with Barton on a self-appointed mission that would explain a lot about the already blown-up HYDRA bases that Fury keeps texting Steve about. She promises Steve she’ll be back by the end of the month but for now, she says, just keep treating Bucky like he’s a person, because nobody’s done that in seventy years.

Steve asks Bucky if it’s all right for Sam to come over, and when Bucky just shrugs, Steve decides it’s not a no. Sam and Bucky disappear into the bedroom for at least a pretense of privacy (the door is kept open several inches while Steve waits anxiously in the other room, listening carefully for any signs of trouble), and ten minutes later only Sam comes back out, looking hopelessly overwhelmed.

He doesn’t say anything about what he’d discussed with Bucky, just talks to Steve a little about what he can come to expect. He explains what it might look like when Bucky is having a flashback and how to bring him back from it. Repeats that he shouldn’t touch Bucky without permission or approach him from behind without alerting him of it first. Advises Steve to read up as much as he can on PTSD and how it affects not only the sufferer but their loved ones.

Steve has never felt more helpless in his life, but not once does it occur to him to give up.

 

* * *

 

Bucky cycles in pinwheeling swoops between terror and blankness and rage.

Steve still does not touch him.

There are degrees to how much Bucky disappears. Often he drifts through the day in a semi-fog, able to function and communicate, but Steve often has to repeat things several times to get through to him. Occasionally, he’s _completely_ gone, leaving just a Bucky-shaped exoskeleton sitting terrifyingly motionless and reactionless in one place for hours at a time. 

Other times, Bucky gets trapped in the past. His flashbacks are not the noisy, dramatic affair that Steve had been expecting. Rather, all of a sudden Bucky will tense up and perhaps begin to tremble, his breathing becoming audible and eyes going glassy or bright with fear. The first time it happened, Steve didn’t even pick up on it until Bucky was so far gone that he ended up hiding under the bed for two hours because he thought Steve was Alexander Pierce. After that, Steve learns to always be on the lookout for the subtler warning signs, knowing that once they become obvious, it’s usually too late.

It’s the outbursts of anger that are the rarest but the worst.

It’s hard to remember that it’s the trauma talking when it’s Bucky voice, Bucky’s mouth that the words are coming from. Harder still to believe that the words are not the truth when they are already things that Steve has told himself.

That he is selfish. Foolish. That he doesn’t know when to let go.

“You should’ve killed me when you had the chance,” Bucky growls over the sound of a coffee mug shattering on the kitchen floor.

It’s the longest sentence he’s been able to string together since he’d returned.

 

* * *

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> additional warning in this chapter for brief references to vomiting and suicidal ideation.

 

Steve tries to learn as much as he can.

He goes on the Internet, to the library, even pops by one of Sam’s meetings at the VA, hiding out at the very back of the room, baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Although there’s obviously no situations that come even close to Bucky’s, Steve still hopes he’s become at least a little more knowledgeable about what Bucky is going through.

But there’s research, and there’s real life, and not even all the medical journals or case studies or group sessions in the world could adequately prepare Steve for the latter.

Bucky’s mind is a tangle of traps and trip wires that seem to reset themselves at any given moment, his moods capable of turning on a dime and at the drop of a hat. Something can be perfectly okay with him one day only to send him completely off the rails the next.

There are so many more snarled, complicated dimensions to the prism of his interactions with Bucky that Steve has never had to think about before, at least not on such an exaggerated scale. He must to be able to judge when to offer help and when it’s best to give Bucky space. Has to forage in the gaps between each of Bucky’s words for all the things that he’s _not_ saying. He needs to be able to assess Bucky’s reactions to everything to gauge whether or not it’s safe to proceed, needs to recognise when a situation is bordering on critical and know how to defuse it before it’s too late.

Steve also finds himself having to suppress his more intense emotions for Bucky’s sake. Despite the fact that Bucky does not seem to possess much emotional literacy in regard to his own feelings, he is surprisingly perceptive when it comes to reading other people, and particularly sensitive when it comes to the manifestation of strong emotions. Steve can feel Bucky constantly watching him, diligently tracking his every action and reaction, analysing his every word, tone, and facial expression, so Steve tries to be extra careful with the way he responds to things lest he send Bucky into a panic.

This has never been a part of their dynamic before. All this tiptoeing, this eggshell-walking. Steve hates himself for acting this way around Bucky because it’s the exact same treatment that he resented receiving from other people when he was small and sickly and everyone handled him as if he was made of glass.

Everyone except Bucky.

Bucky had somehow always managed to look out for Steve in a way that didn’t also suggest that he thought Steve was helpless. When Steve was ill, Bucky made sure to be discreet in his ways of caring for him – probably because he knew Steve would reject any overt coddling. He’d bring food to Steve’s house, claiming that his folks had prepared too much and wouldn’t be able to finish it before it spoiled. If Steve was too weak to get into the bath, Bucky would come over and sponge him down under the guise of being too disgusted with the way Steve smelled to bear it any longer. Whenever Bucky ended a fight Steve had started, he never went off on him about how he shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing with his puny stature and poor health, didn’t shower Steve with a flurry of questions about whether he was okay; he’d just help Steve to his feet and dab the blood from his face and mutter with a certain fond exasperation, “Had ‘em on the ropes, huh.”

 

* * *

 

The panic attacks are what frighten Steve the most. There is an urgency about them that is absent from Bucky’s other symptoms, even his flashbacks, which continue to be relatively self-contained occurrences in that Bucky could probably relive an entire traumatic memory in the middle of a crowded room and only a few sharp-eyed people would be able to spot it. The flashbacks fall inward, insidious quiet collapses.

The panic attacks, on the other hand, are an explosion. In a rare moment of openness, Bucky once told Steve that it feels like dying, and from an outsider’s point of view, that’s certainly what it looks like. It’s cold sweat and convulsive tremors, wet choking breaths coming too quick and too shallow, and Bucky looking at Steve with widened, pleading eyes as if begging him to stop what’s happening. The terror is so great, apparently, so overwhelming, that it completely overrides Bucky’s usual default setting of being casually suicidal, and where he once would have welcomed his own death with open arms, it suddenly becomes the scariest, most horrifying thing to ever exist, and there is nothing that he wants more in those very moments than to live.

Steve secretly welcomes this as a good sign, taking it to mean that there must be at least  _some_ part of Bucky, regardless of how unconscious or deeply-hidden, that _does_ want to live. Steve just has to figure out how to bring that part a little closer to the surface.

“There are people who can help you,” Steve tells Bucky after he’s finished wiping up vomit from the living room floor.

Bucky doesn’t look up from where he’s curled up in the armchair, legs pulled up to his chest and chin resting on his knees, but his entire body goes tense, like he’s preparing to bolt.

“No,” he mutters, and he would look and sound almost laughably petulant if it weren’t for the circumstances. If he hadn’t just pitched forward off the sofa and thrown up in a violently physical reaction to some deep-rooted, unplaceable memory that had descended upon him like a fury.

“There’re doctors who specialise in helping people with these issues,” Steve says without thinking, but quickly realises the mistake of his choice of words when Bucky cringes visibly.

“No doctors,” he says.

“I didn’t mean like... like _their_ doctors,” Steve says quickly, scrambling to do damage control. “Bucky, those techs and scientists weren’t real doctors. Doctors help people who are sick.”

“’m not sick,” Bucky mumbles stubbornly into his knees, and Steve tactfully chooses not to point out the fact that he’d just emptied out the contents of his stomach all over the hardwood floor. “It’s just—” Bucky raises a hand and gestures vaguely around his head, “—my brain’s just all messed up.”

“That’s the thing, though,” Steve says patiently. “The brain is... Any part of you can get sick or hurt, right? I know you don’t really remember when I... There used to be a boatload of things wrong with me. I don’t think there was a single damn part of my body that worked the way it was supposed to. My heart, my lungs, my eyes, my digestive tract... Nothing.”

Bucky finally raises his head, fixing Steve with a bit of a puzzled look, as if waiting to see what point he’s trying to make. Steve hopes Bucky doesn’t think he’s talking down to him; Steve has to admit that even he doesn’t fully understand what he’s talking about and he’s just kind of winging it.

“What I’m saying is,” he goes on, “The brain can get sick, too. In a bit of a different way, maybe, but it’s still... So there’re special doctors for the brain now.”

“People’ve fucked with my brain enough, Steve,” Bucky says flatly.

“It’s not like that. All you have to do is talk.”

A flash of something unsettlingly close to terror flickers in Bucky’s ocean floor eyes and he can’t keep the nervous quaver out of his voice when he whispers, “If I talk, they... They take it away from me. I can’t have them take— Steve, please. Don’t make me.”

Steve sighs, shoulders dropping in defeat, anvil heart sinking a little further in his chest. “Of course not, Buck. I’d never... I’d never make you do anything.”

 

* * *

 

“He’s never gonna be the same, you know,” Sam reminds Steve over the phone while Bucky is asleep in the bedroom, recovering from another exhausting reexperiencing episode.

Steve bristles at Sam’s words. “I _know_. And he knows, too. It’s the first thing he said to me. And I told him that’s okay. He’s here, Sam. That’s all that matters. And I’m going to help him get better if it’s the last thing I do.”

There’s a long pause on the other end of the line before Sam finally says, “I’m not just talking about how he won’t be the guy he used to be. I mean he might not even...” He takes a deep breath. “He might not ever get better. Even with your help. Even with all the help in the world. This... This could be as good as it gets for him.”

“So I should just give up?” Steve snaps, the words coming out more harshly than he’d intended, and he’s instantly disgusted with himself for letting his emotions get the best of him. It’s been a long, arduous week and he’s been bottling everything up to keep from upsetting Bucky, but that’s no excuse.

It’s just... Sam’s words frighten him. Of course Steve understands that Bucky is no longer the same person he once knew, but hope is the only thing that’s keeping him going right now. Hope that things can get better. That he’ll be able to find something – _anything_ – of his best friend in the hollowed-out wreckage that HYDRA made of him.

Fortunately, Sam seems to understand that Steve’s not exactly in the best state of mind right now.

“I’m just trying to be realistic here,” he says gently. “I mean... Have you even thought about what you’re going to do if... if things don’t change? You can’t care for him like this forever, and certainly not all on your own. To be honest, I think he should probably be in a hospital right now.”

“No hospitals,” Steve says flatly. “I promised him.”

“Steve... You can’t— you shouldn’t promise those kinds of things.”

“I know, I probably shouldn’t’ve. But Sam... he looked about ready to take off even just when I brought up therapy. I couldn’t... I didn’t want to scare him away. I promised I wouldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do. That’s a freedom that he’s been denied for seventy years, and I’m not about to take it away from him.”

Sam doesn’t have anything to say to that.

 

* * *

 

Despite Sam’s foreboding words, Bucky learns to be human again startlingly quickly.

(Perhaps _too_ quickly, Steve will later think to himself, berating himself mercilessly for having let his relief blind him to what was truly going on.)

At first, Steve is elated and encouraged by the visible changes in Bucky’s behaviour, until he remembers a passage in HYDRA’s notes about how Bucky’s handlers were pleased by how swiftly the asset could be made to look and act like a person again for missions that required him to be out in the world for several days at a time.

It makes Steve wonder if the seemingly miraculous pace of Bucky’s progress is just more of his conditioning taking hold. If there’s _any_ part of Bucky that HYDRA hasn’t touched.

Still, Steve is quite certain that he’ll take even conditioned improvement over things staying the same, or getting worse.

 _Fake it ‘til you make it_ has pretty much been the rule by which he’s lived most of his life, and Bucky is going to make it, Steve’s sure of it.

He’s noticeably more functional than he’d been even just a week ago. He speaks more in full sentences and spends less time staring off into space. He interacts better with other people and with his environment. On Sam’s suggestion and with Steve’s help, he sets up a routine of waking, eating, and going to bed at the same time every day, which Sam says will provide him with some much-needed structure and stability in his life, as well as help him regain some understanding of the related concepts of hunger and fatigue.

(“That pang in your stomach that you start to feel around... seventeen thirty to eighteen thirty,” Steve explains to him, “That’s how it feels to be hungry. When you feel that way, you’ll know you should eat soon.”)

It’s like a breath of fresh air to watch Bucky slowly learn to identify and acknowledge his needs, to start to say things like, “I’m thirsty,” or “It’s too cold in the bedroom,” even if he still has the tendency to hunch into himself after he’s spoken, as if bracing himself for harsh rejection, or even punishment. It makes Steve’s blood boil, to know that HYDRA has fucked with Bucky’s head to the point where he doesn’t even feel as though he has the right to express his own needs, but the fact that he is making such an effort to do so anyway makes Steve’s chest swell with a buoyant, irrepressible pride.

 

* * *

Steve still does not touch him, but it’s certainly not for lack of wanting.

There’s nothing he wants more.

His body is drawn to Bucky’s body in a way that feels like a law of nature. A mutual pull, like protons and electrons within an atom. That’s how it’s always been.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you boys were a pair of magnets,” Steve’s mom had told him once, and maybe they still are, but they’ve been flipped onto their repelling poles, and Steve doesn’t know how to bring them back together again. Where they were once two things moving together in equal measures, Steve now feels like a planet that’s been thrown out of orbit and is struggling to make its way back to its star.

Not being able to be close to Bucky is... unnatural and unsettling. Steve’s movements around him are stilted and overly-controlled, and even then he sometimes gets halfway to touching him before he realises what he’s doing and draws away.

Bucky never seems to react negatively to these near-misses,though, which is immensely encouraging for Steve, but whenever he thinks about actually asking to touch Bucky, he recalls an earlier conversation he’d had with Natasha.

“You guys were goin’ steady, weren’t you?” she asked him, speaking over the phone from some safehouse in Belarus, a few miles east of Minsk, at four thirty a.m. her time.

Steve could barely suppress a snort. “Does anyone even say that anymore?”

“Just making sure there’s no language barrier between us, Rogers.”

“Uh huh...”

There was a pause, then Natasha said quietly, “Does he remember?”

Steve swallowed hard. “He... No, I don’t think so.”

“You gonna tell him?” Natasha asked bluntly.

“...I don’t know. I think he already feels pressured to be... to be someone he’s not. I don’t want him to have that hanging over his head, too.”

“That’s probably for the best.”

Steve didn’t reply. Funny how all these things that were allegedly for the best seemed to hurt the most.

“You shouldn’t touch him without asking first,” Natasha said after a moment.

“I know,” Steve replied curtly, getting a little irked that everyone seemed to think he was stupid. “Sam already told me, and of course I don’t want to spook him.”

“It’s not just that, though,” Natasha said. “I mean, yeah, it’s important that you don’t startle him, but it’s also because of what’s been done to him. To his body. He hasn’t had a say in what happens to his body in seventy years. Letting him be able to control even something as seemingly trivial as who touches him and when is really important.”

Steve frowned. It hadn’t even occurred to him to think of it in that way, but he then realised it made all too much sense. Not only had HYDRA only ever touched Bucky to hurt him, but they had literally picked him apart, changed the very landscape of his body without his permission.

Natasha then went on to add that Bucky hasn’t been able to make his own decisions in a very long time so it’s going to be very overwhelming for him at first, which Steve took as her way of telling him not even to _ask_ to touch Bucky until it seems like Bucky can handle making that kind of choice.

He couldn’t deny that she had a point.

He’s already witnessed for himself Bucky’s difficulties with making decisions, especially when there are too many variables involved, though he’s found that it often helps to provide him with the available options. For example, “Would you like water, lemonade, or ginger ale?” seems to work a lot better than the more open-ended, “What do you want to drink?” It feels less like scrambling for a foothold in outer space and more like arriving at a fork in the road where all that has to be done is choose which one to take.

Sometimes, when Bucky is feeling adventurous enough, he will even ask Steve if he can first sample possibilities so that he can make a more informed decision. They’ll watch the opening ten minutes of three different movies or try a spoonful of each of the flavours of ice cream that Steve has in the freezer.

(When Bucky chooses strawberry – something that the Bucky from before the war never would have done – Steve has to suppress a yawning ache inside his chest, but the smile that flutters onto Bucky’s lips after the first mouthful maybe makes it all okay.)

As it is with all things, some days are worse than others. Some days even the simplest, most delicately-worded questions will leave Bucky panicked and confused and exhausted for hours. Sometimes Steve makes the mistake of asking too many questions at once, sending Bucky into a flurry of frustration that Steve can’t do anything about, can only stay out of the way until the dust has settled again.

But there are also days that are better than others.

Days where Bucky not only makes decisions more easily, but even goes so far as to ask for things for himself. Days where it’s clear that he is getting to know himself better, because his choices have become more consistent – he always selects blueberries over raspberries. He prefers cream in his coffee, not milk. He likes Ace Of Base but not ABBA and Steve doesn’t like either, but he smiles whenever Bucky puts it on anyway.

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ugh i know the narration is kinda fractured and choppy right now, but please bear with me... if it makes it any better (doubtful??), i've noticed that "lilies" kind of runs in the same arc - beginning with scattered short scenes separated by erratic time skips, but then the chunks slowly start getting longer and plottier once i've built up the framework of the story, and then hopefully in the end it flows at least marginally acceptably???? idk. i literally do not know what i'm doing. why am i still writing in this box.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> additional warning in this chapter for the tail-end of bucky's vomiting, and non-graphic self-harm and an ensuing conversation about it, which also mentions suicidal ideation.

 

Steve comes home from grocery shopping to find Bucky dry-heaving into the toilet and Sam knelt down next to him, speaking in low, soothing tones as he massages him between the shoulderblades with a reassuring hand.

Neither of them seem to notice Steve standing in the doorway, and he suddenly feels uncomfortably voyeuristic, an uninvited witness of an intensely private moment.

He also feels startlingly angry, a nasty resentment simmering up within him for reasons he wishes he could say he didn’t understand. But he does, and they disgust him, because they are all entirely selfish.

He’s angry that Bucky had sought out Sam when he needed help, not Steve; that Sam is touching Bucky in a way that Steve has been aching to do for _years_ now. Angry that it’s Sam and not him who gets to be the first person in decades to lay a hand on Bucky for a reason other than to hurt him.

Steve coughs a little from where he’s standing in the doorway to alert Sam and Bucky of his presence.

The curved line of Bucky’s back tenses but he doesn’t lift his head.

Sam, meanwhile, looks up, and says, “Oh, hey, Steve.”

“Everything okay?” Steve asks tersely. “What’s going on?”

Sam glances towards Bucky, who still doesn’t look up, but raises an arm and makes a vaguely dismissive motion with his hand.

“’m okay,” he mumbles thickly.

He coughs, spits, flushes the toilet, then finally turns to face Steve. His eyes are glassy and wet, which Steve assumes is an involuntary reaction to having been vomiting.

“I just...” Bucky pauses and nervously licks his lips. “I freaked out a little bit.”

“You should’ve called me,” Steve chides him gently.

Bucky shrugs, lowering his eyes in what could be shame. “Didn’t want to bother you.”

“You’re never a bother.”

Bucky just stares miserably down at the toilet bowl.

Meanwhile, Sam rises to his feet and awkwardly clears his throat. “So, uh. I guess I’ll... be going...”

He moves to leave the room and Steve puts a hand on his shoulder as he passes by.

“Thank you, Sam,” he says quietly, hoping he sounds as sincere as he feels.

All those sizzling lances of resentment have fled his body and he truly _is_ grateful that Sam was able to be there for Bucky, that he was even _willing_ to be, after everything that’s happened. Despite Sam’s constant reassurances that his world has become ‘ten times more kick-ass’ ever since Steve and co. muscled their way into his affairs, Steve nevertheless retains a certain amount of guilt for having dragged Sam into this whole mess, especially when Sam had been so well on his way to reforging a normal life for himself. He can’t imagine how it must have felt for Sam to put on those wings again when the last memory he had of them was of watching his best friend get shot out of the sky. And now, here he is offering up whatever help he can to someone he certainly does not have any obligation towards; hell, no one would blame him if he never wanted to set foot near Bucky ever again. But Sam is not that type of guy, and not for the first time, Steve finds himself wondering how he ever got to be so lucky as to have someone like Sam Wilson in his life.

Sam gives Steve a tired but genuine smile.

“Any time, Cap,” he says. “You know where to find me if you need me.”

“Thank you,” Steve repeats.

He shows Sam out of the apartment before returning to Bucky, who has managed to get himself up on his feet and is standing in the middle of the bathroom looking a bit confused but slightly more lucid, his eyes no longer as glazed over.

“How’re you feeling?” Steve asks him.

Bucky shrugs. “Better, I guess.”

Nobody makes any move to exit the room. Bucky is looking around distractedly, as if attempting to regain his bearings, while Steve is trying to work up the nerve to ask to touch Bucky, having been lent a certain amount of confidence by the fact that Bucky had obviously been okay with Sam rubbing his shoulders as a comforting gesture.

That’s all Steve wants to be able to do. To comfort Bucky. To make him feel safe and loved. Words are not nearly enough in this respect. They are too distant, impersonal. Even the most fervently uttered syllables are nothing compared to the tangible warmth of another human being’s presence, the pure melody of two bodies forming a perfect cadence.

It makes Steve heartsick to think about how long it’s been since Bucky has been able to experience that kind of closeness, especially since it was something he’d always craved when they were younger. Like a pair of ice dancers that can only be separate from one another for ten seconds at a time, Steve and Bucky existed in a constant ebb and flow of contact. They weren’t so much permanently glued together as they drifted in and out from each other like a steady tide, unconsciously moving in for tiny touches every few moments, then wafting away again before coming back for more. The purpose of this routine was simple: to draw some sort of strength from the other, as well as make sure they were still there and still whole.

That’s what nobody else – not Sam, not Natasha – seems to understand. They’re all so worried about how Bucky might react to being touched that they aren’t considering the reverse scenario: how _not_ being touched might be affecting him. They didn’t want Steve to pressure Bucky into having to make any decisions he wasn’t ready for, but what if the real issue is that Bucky _does_ want this but doesn’t know how to ask for it? If there’s anything that Steve’s noticed from Bucky’s behaviour, it’s that by this point, Bucky has more difficulty asking _for_ things than _denying_ them.

The thought of Bucky desperately wanting to be touched but being unable to take initiative himself makes Steve’s chest tighten. What’s more, what if Bucky has interpreted people’s caution as aversion? What if he doesn’t understand that they’re trying to protect him and instead thinks the reason why no one is touching him is because nobody _wants_ to touch him? God knows that after what HYDRA did to him, mutilating his mind and body the way they did, Bucky will want to know that people don’t see him as something tainted or spoiled, and the idea that Steve might have unwittingly been giving the opposite impression is making him feel nauseous.

“Bucky,” he chokes out, the two syllables punching its way through his lips before he can stop them.

Bucky just fixes him with a bit of a puzzled look.

Steve takes a deep breath and fights to keep his voice steady when he says, “Can I touch you?”

He’s not sure what kind of reaction he expects from Bucky, but Bucky hardly gives him one at all. Just nods, once, and the overly stiff line of his spine seems to relax ever so slightly, shoulders unhunching themselves, which Steve takes as a good sign seeing as Bucky is usually so tense.

Steve takes two slow, careful steps towards him until they’re about a foot apart and then places a hand on Bucky’s right shoulder, gently thumbing the ridge of his clavicle and letting loose the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. He feels shaky and dizzy, like he’s not getting enough air, or maybe he’s getting _too much_ , because he thinks he read somewhere that hyperventilation actually results in too much oxygen in the body and not enough carbon dioxide, even though the former is what people associate with being able to breathe.

Bucky’s breathing, meanwhile, has become even and slow, and Steve thinks this is the most relaxed he’s ever seen him.

Maybe this is what Bucky had needed all along. What they’d _both_ needed.

 

* * *

 

Over the next few weeks, Steve gradually reintroduces touch to his interactions with Bucky. It seems to help. Bucky is more relaxed, less jumpy. He’s a bit subdued, but Steve thinks that’s preferable to when he used to be wound tight as a tourniquet, chaotic cacophonies cutting off the circulation of rational thought to his brain.

Steve is still careful with him, of course – always making sure to ask first, letting him know where he means to put his hands, and trying not to let them linger for too long despite wanting nothing more than to never let go – but there is a renewed sense of ease to all his movements now, like he’s finally been able to step down from the tightrope wire he’d been forcing himself to walk for too long.

His guess that physical contact is doing everyone some good is all but confirmed when, in response to Steve asking Bucky how he was able to remember who he was on that crashing helicarrier, Bucky says, “It was all in the hands.”

Steve damn near weeps in relief at that because it means he finally has something to offer. He’s felt so utterly useless in the face of Bucky’s demons, only ever able to hover at the sidelines providing almost laughably inadequate words of reassurance, but now, now he can finally be of some real help, since his hands are a medium that he actually knows how to work with. All the other ways in which he’s been trying to help Bucky – reminding him what year it is, trying to get him to stick to his daily schedule, reading up on PTSD – they’re all so unfamiliar to him. It makes him feel like a fraud somehow, as though he’s afraid Bucky will be able to see right through him and realise that Steve has no idea what he’s doing, like a professor trying to teach a subject they know nothing about to a student who has already majored in the area.

With his hands, however, Steve knows _exactly_ what he’s doing. He knows where Bucky used to like being touched, the specific amount of pressure to apply when wrapping his arms around him, the precise angles at which Bucky would recline in towards Steve’s body.

He can only hope that by touching Bucky in some of those same ways, he can shake loose some deeply-lodged fragment of memory that might help Bucky come back to being the person he used to be. Or, at least, the closest approximation to it that can be expected given the circumstances.

Steve tries not to hope for too much, though. He knows it’s not fair to Bucky, plus according to Sam, Bucky’s already been doing extraordinarily well, far exceeding expectations, so it’s not like Steve can really ask for much more.

“I can’t believe it,” Sam admits to him, looking slightly sheepish. “To be perfectly honest with you, I never thought he’d... I didn’t think this kind of progress was possible.”

Steve smiles and says with no small amount of pride in his voice, “You don’t know him like I do.”

 

* * *

 

The world has an almost uncanny way of proving Steve wrong just when he thinks he’s finally seen the worst.

No amount of research in the world could have prepared him for the real life experience of witnessing Bucky’s symptoms. The tidal wave terror of his panic, the erratic bursts of anger and irrationality, and, most notably, the shockingly somatic manifestations of his distress.

Those were what frightened Steve the most, at first. He knows all about how it feels to have your body turn on you, but he hadn’t been able to understand what was giving Bucky such terrible migraines or making him throw up all the time or causing him to wet the bed. He’d started to worry that it was some side effect of all the physical strain Bucky’s body had been put through for so long, that maybe seventy years of wiping and freezing was finally beginning to take their toll on his system.

When Steve eventually learned that all these physical ailments were as much a result of trauma as the flashbacks and the jumpiness, it was simultaneously a relief and a horror. The former because at least it meant Bucky didn’t have some freakish disease, but the latter because Steve hadn’t realised until then what a truly all-encompassing enemy they were up against, a battle that consumed both body and brain alike.

Still, he likes to think that he’s grown to be a little more accustomed to all of it by now. Not that it’s become any easier to deal with, of course, but at least it no longer sends him into a panic because he doesn’t know what’s happening, doesn’t know if it’s ‘normal’ or not.

That is, until the morning he wakes up to go to the washroom and finds Bucky sitting blank-eyed on the edge of the bathtub, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, blood running down his leg from somewhere around his thigh. There is a paring knife still gripped loosely in his metal hand.

Steve feels like his heart and his stomach have switched places. This is not something he’s been equipped to deal with. Not something that had ever even so much as crossed his mind as a potential scenario. He doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t even really know what _Bucky_ was trying to do.  (Though his mind keeps drifting to the sole most frightening possibility, the thing that Steve cannot even bear to think about because even just imagining it makes it far too real for him.)

“Bucky,” he whispers, trying not to let his horror show in his voice.

Bucky lifts dull, flattened eyes in Steve’s direction but says nothing.

“Give me the knife, please, Bucky,” Steve says quietly.

He expects at least some resistance, so he’s surprised when all Bucky does is uncurl his fingers from around the hilt of the knife to allow Steve to take it from him.

Steve tosses it into the sink before he crouches down next to Bucky, looking up at him with imploring eyes that Bucky does not meet with his own.

“I’m gonna take a look at the cut, okay?” Steve tells him, prompting Bucky to give a lethargic nod.

Steve takes a deep breath to brace himself for what he’s about to see. It’s not like he’s squeamish, not when he’d seen men lose limbs and innards on battlefields all across Europe, but it’s the fact that it’s _Bucky_ , and that he did it to _himself_ , that leaves Steve feeling shaky on his feet.

He has to swallow several times when Bucky parts his legs slightly to allow Steve to kneel down between them, seeing as the wound is on the inside of Bucky’s thigh. Steve nervously glances up at him, wondering if anything about this situation is making him uncomfortable, but Bucky is unmoving, expressionless, still staring impassively ahead, showing no signs of remembering what it used to mean when the two of them were positioned in this way.

Steve wants to kick himself for thinking about that at a time like this. Bucky hasn’t said or done anything as of yet to indicate that he recalls what their relationship used to be like, and Steve has been exceedingly careful not to give him any hints, either. It’s the last thing Bucky needs to deal with right now.

Forcing his mind back to the task at hand, Steve examines the cut. It’s a gash across the meaty inside portion of Bucky’s right thigh, fairly deep but only bleeding sluggishly, already well on its way to healing up. On anyone else it probably would have required a couple of stitches, but even on a normal person it would not have been anywhere close to a fatal incision, so it probably means Bucky hadn’t been trying to do... _that._

But if not that, then what else?

Steve rises to his feet with a sigh and washes his hands before heading over to the medicine cabinet where he gathers up some butterfly bandages, a sheet of dressing cloth, and a roll of medical tape. It’s admittedly all a bit of overkill, seeing as holding a towel against the cut for another ten minutes would probably have the same effect, but there’s a wistfully self-indulgent part of Steve that wants to be able to care for Bucky in the same way that Bucky used to do for him. He also clings to a hazy hope that being a part of this patching-up process, even if it’s on the wrong side of the equation, will help Bucky remember more about how things used to be before the war.

There’s no risk of infection with them, so Steve just goes straight to dabbing the area clear of blood and applying two butterfly bandages to the widest parts of the wound before he lays the dressing across it and tapes the edges down.

“All in the hands,” he murmurs to himself, feeling oddly overwhelmed by the intimacy of the situation despite its somewhat one-sided nature; Bucky doesn’t exactly seem to share Steve’s awe of the moment, but the fact that he’s letting Steve be this close to him, trusting him to make things better, is already more than enough.

“Thank you,” Bucky says, slightly mechanically, once Steve’s finished and has taken a seat next to him on the tub’s edge.

“Always, Buck,” Steve replies, trying very hard to smile in a way that doesn’t crease his eyes because he’s afraid that if he even so much as flutters an eyelash, he’ll start to cry and won’t be able to stop.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky says after a moment, noticing Steve’s distress.

“You didn’t do anything wrong. You... It just scared me, is all. Bucky... What were you trying to— Why did you do that?”

Bucky takes a long, deep breath and for a while it doesn’t seem like he’s going to answer until finally he grunts, “Too much... Felt like I was gonna... There was this... explosive pressure. Like... a volcano that- that can’t erupt...”

Steve frowns, trying desperately to understand.

Bucky must be able to tell that he’s not getting his point across as clearly as he would like because he clenches his fists and makes a noise of frustration in his throat, entire body suddenly seeming dangerously charged.

A sharp sorrow spears its way into Steve’s lungs. He knows that Bucky struggles with words sometimes, and he can’t exactly blame him. The things that were done to him were, quite literally, unspeakable. Beyond the scope of what any language was constructed to convey. Being able to put such horror into words means also being able to comprehend it, so it’s no surprise that Bucky has such difficulty expressing himself in this manner.

Maybe Bucky doesn’t need to explain himself in too much detail as long as he can answer the one most important question that Steve has.

“You weren’t gonna... kill yourself, were you?” he asks uneasily, unable to keep his syllables from clattering together.

Bucky’s head whips over to stare at him, and Steve can’t figure out what his fiery-eyed, almost stricken expression means but he’ll take it over the deadness any day.

“No,” Bucky says, with surprising conviction.

Steve’s whole body seems to sag into itself. “O-okay. Good.”

“That’s what you thought I was trying to do?” Bucky asks, sounding genuinely stunned.

“Kinda hard to come to any other conclusion,” Steve replies dryly.

Bucky shakes his head, and Steve waits for him to elaborate on what his intentions were if they weren’t related to suicide, but he doesn’t speak.

They sit there in silence for a little while longer until Steve pipes up again to ask Bucky to promise him something, though he instantly regrets having phrased himself in such a demanding way when he sees Bucky’s body tense up.

“Sorry,” Steve says. “It’s just... Can you... If you’re ever – y’know... If you’re ever thinking about... doing... _that_... Like... _really_ thinking about it... You tell me, okay? If things get to be that bad, you have to promise you’ll tell me.”

Bucky relaxes by a fraction of an inch and says, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Steve echoes, unable to keep himself from feeling a surge of relief. Obviously this isn’t exactly a legally binding contract or anything, but somehow it still reassures him to know that maybe this isn’t something that Steve will constantly have to be worrying about, continuously on high alert for any possible warning signs.

“It’s like a balloon,” Bucky says out of the blue.

“A balloon,” Steve repeats quizzically.

Bucky nods. “A too-full balloon. Spread too thin. Too much inside. Needs to pop.”

Steve goes over this new information in his head and thinks he might get it now.

The closest comparison he can come up with is stress relief. He knows that too-full balloon feeling. Or at least, his own less extreme version of it. The feeling that sends him to the twenty-four hour gym at four in the morning to destroy punching bag after punching bag (all ones of his own purchase, since he’s ruined a few too many of the ones that actually belong to the gym).

Bucky’s punching bag, Steve realises, is his own body.

“You should come with me to the gym one day, Buck,” he suggests.

Bucky raises a skeptical eyebrow at him.

“We can go at fucked-up hours,” Steve continues, “On nights where you can’t sleep or something. So we’d probably be the only ones there.”

Bucky seems to think very seriously about this for a moment before he nods, the warm edges of a cautious, tentative smile unfurling on his petal lips like a flower opening up after a long, unforgiving winter.

 

* * *

 

Ever since Bucky returned home – and how nice it is to think of it that way, as coming _home_ , because that’s finally what it’s started to feel like – Steve has been sleeping in the living room on the pullout couch that he’s often too lazy to actually set up as a bed. Bucky has the bedroom to himself, and though they turn off the lights at around the same time every night, Steve knows Bucky doesn’t actually get very much sleep, because Steve doesn’t sleep much either.

He can’t. Not when the walls of the apartment aren’t thick enough to block out the noise of Bucky’s nightmares coming from behind the closed door. Sounds of thrashing, sometimes awful whimpers or groans, smatterings of words in languages that Steve doesn’t understand.

There’s never much Steve can do about any of it, though. Even in the very beginning he knew better than to wake Bucky by touching him, but even just getting close and repeating his name had sent a metal fist lashing out towards him before Bucky became cognisant enough to realise what was happening.

So far, all Steve has been able to do is try to wake Bucky from a safe distance, then stay with him through the aftermath, not touching, often not even speaking, simply sitting side by side on the bed until Bucky’s breath stops catching. Sometimes he lays back down and Steve returns to the living room. Other times they don’t even bother trying to go back to sleep and instead Steve just brews up a hot beverage – usually coffee, occasionally tea or hot chocolate – and they go to the gym or watch television, depending on whether Bucky is feeling wired or drained.

Tonight, however, Steve decides he can do more than that.

When he hears the all too familiar sounds of muffled thumps against the mattress followed by a chillingly terrified whimper, he tiptoes towards the bedroom and knocks on the door.

“Buck?” he calls out. “Bucky, it’s Steve. You’re having a nightmare. ...Bucky?”

What that fails to rouse him from sleep, the next course of action is to open the door and flick on the light, which Steve dreads doing every time, because he hates having to see Bucky looking so strikingly small and vulnerable, curled up alone in a queen sized bed with the covers pulled up almost over his head as he struggles to protect himself from an assailant no one else can see.

If it’s a bad one – which, as luck would have it, it is tonight – then there’s nothing Steve can do but wait for Bucky to emerge from it on his own.

After what feels like an eternity, Bucky’s almost spastic movements finally begin to ease up and the tiny plaintive cries he’d been making dry up into series of harsh, wet breaths.

“Bucky,” Steve says again.

Bucky peeps out from under the blankets, blinking in the sudden light, his hoarse voice sounding vaguely confused as he mumbles, “Steve...?”

“Yeah, pal,” Steve says, slowly taking a seat at the foot of the bed. “You... You were having a pretty bad dream.”

“I couldn’t remember,” Bucky replies dazedly.

“Well, you usually don’t remember much of your nightmares.”

“No, I mean...” Bucky pauses to gnaw away at his lower lip before clarifying, “I mean in the... in the dream. In the dream, I- I couldn’t remember anymore.”

“Oh,” Steve says, feeling his chest tighten with sorrow.

“I _do_ remember, though,” Bucky insists desperately, sounding more like he’s trying to convince himself than anyone else. “It was just a dream. Here, I... I remember.”

“I know you do,” Steve says quietly, shuffling higher up in the bed so that they’re sitting next to each other. “Bucky, no one’s ever going to make you forget again. Not as long as I’m around.”

“I still forget little things, though.”

“That’s different,” Steve assures him. “Sam said those kinds of memory problems are normal.”

“I just don’t... I don’t wanna forget.”

Steve swallows hard. He can’t bear seeing Bucky like this, struggling and looking _so alone_.

“Can I put my arm around you?” he asks.

“Y-yeah.”

As always, Bucky’s body seems to slacken ever so slightly as Steve reaches towards him, curling his arm around Bucky’s shoulders and drawing him in close, unable to suppress a shivering smile when Bucky seems to sink in towards him.

“Feel me?” Steve murmurs, also taking Bucky’s hand in his own, “’m right here. I’ll always be right here, and if you ever feel like you’re forgetting, I’ll make sure you remember.”

Bucky doesn’t respond, just folds himself even further into Steve’s embrace, going so pliant that Steve thinks he’s fallen asleep. His head is bowed so low that Steve can’t see whether or not this is the case, so he gives Bucky a slight shake. As much as he’d love to let himself doze off holding Bucky like this, he’s not sure if it would be the best idea.

Bucky starts, leading Steve to immediately draw away from him.

“Sorry,” he says quickly. “I just— I wasn’t sure if you were awake or not...”

Bucky blinks muzzily a few times. “Mm... I’m... I’m tired, I guess.”

He makes no move to lay back down, though; he’s always reluctant to go back to bed after his worst nightmares. Sometimes they leave him so buzzed that he has to spend a few hours winding down, but this one has apparently exhausted him instead, and Steve hates the thought of Bucky being so tired but also too afraid to let himself fall back asleep.

That’s when Steve says, “I... I could, uh... Stay. With you, I mean. Here, I mean. If- if you want. It might... help.”

For a moment, Steve thinks he sees a look of pure panic splash across Bucky’s features, but it lasts less than a fraction of a second and when Bucky says, “Yeah, sure,” he sounds so easygoing, so much like _Bucky_ , that Steve decides he’d just imagined whatever it was he thought he’d seen on his face.

They settle back down into bed. Steve sticks to the far edge of his side to avoid crowding Bucky, acutely aware of what a huge step this already is and not wanting to push his luck. Not that he needs to; even with several feet of space between them, the feeling of sharing sheets with Bucky again is just... incredible. More than Steve thought he’d ever be able to experience.

That night, he gets the best sleep he’s had in weeks. He's pretty sure Bucky does, too, because there’s not another peep from him, either.

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *obligatory 'I DON'TK NOW WHAT I'M DOINGGG' freakout endnote*
> 
> also forgive any editing/spelling disasters i'm running on empty rn but decided to post this anyway when really the better option would have been to get some goddamn _sleep_...


	4. Chapter 4

 

Steve worries every time Bucky leaves the house. Not so much because he thinks Bucky can’t handle it, since on the good days he’s proven himself to be surprisingly capable of doing so, it’s more just for the somewhat irrational reason of simply not wanting Bucky to be anywhere that Steve isn’t.

Because at least when Steve can see him, can _touch_ him, he knows Bucky is here and safe and Steve can put himself between him and anything that tries to challenge that.

It’s clingy. Steve will admit it. Possibly even borderline neurotic. But he just can’t stand letting Bucky out of his sight when the world is filled with so many things that could take take Bucky away from him again. He would never be able to forgive himself if something terrible happened to Bucky because he wasn’t there to stop it.

 _Then again_ , that cruel voice in his head never fails to remind him, _something terrible happened to Bucky even when you_ were _there to stop it, so what difference does it really make?_

(Well, he hasn’t forgiven himself for that, either.)

It’s just that, with Peggy gone, Bucky is all Steve has from his past. The sole remaining confirmation he has that he ever existed before the shield. And while Bucky may not remember much of it, may not even be the same man at all, he’s still the only person left to whom the name Steve Rogers has ever meant more than Captain America.

He doesn’t say any of this to Bucky, of course. Never even so much as a _be careful_ as Bucky walks out the door. Leaving the apartment can be enough of a challenge for him even without Steve putting all kinds of ridiculous ideas into his head, plus what exactly is it that Steve thinks he’s warning Bucky about anyway? The perils of hipster-run Dupont Circle coffeeshops? That cracked piece of sidewalk at the end of the block that’s easy to trip on?

If anything, they are probably safer than they’ve ever been – from the rest of the world, at least, what with Steve on indefinite leave from superhero’ing and them living their lives more quietly and unobtrusively than ever. The only war they’re fighting now exists within the four walls of their home, and it just might be their most dangerous one yet, but at least it’s contained. It can be monitored, kept in check. Which is why Steve can’t help but to feel such an anxiety whenever Bucky heads out alone – he hates no longer having any control over the situation.

Today, however, when Bucky says he’ll do the grocery shopping, Steve reacts not just with the usual apprehension, but also with an undeniable sense of relief.

He feels like an immense weight has been lifted from his chest, and it horrifies him.

It makes it sound like he’s glad to be rid of Bucky, as if Bucky’s presence is some intolerable chore from which Steve is desperate for a break. It’s not like that, though. It _can’t_ be. He knows that any moment he gets to spend with Bucky is a gift – even the ones when Bucky is panicking or lost in his head somewhere or yelling at Steve for keeping him alive when he doesn’t want to be. No matter how hurtful or frightening Bucky’s actions are sometimes, Steve is just grateful to be able to experience them at all.

...He’s just so _tired_.

While Bucky may not need the same kind of constant care that he had in the first few weeks of coming home, that doesn’t mean it’s not still exhausting to be around him. For Steve to constantly be feeling like he’s tiptoeing through a minefield, needing to be mindful of his every step lest he set off some catastrophic, explosive reaction. Having to bury all his emotions in a block of concrete because he can’t afford to get wrapped up in his own feelings when Bucky’s wellbeing is on the line.

Being forced to watch Bucky in so much pain and being utterly unable to stop it.

It’s that last feeling in particular that is the most unsettling and foreign for Steve, because if there is anything that he’s ever refused to let himself be, it’s helpless. The last time he’d felt this helpless was when he watched Bucky fall. Other than that, even during the lowest times of his life – when his mother was sick, when _he_ was sick, when they could scarcely afford to eat, when he lost men in the war – he’d always somehow maintained the belief that there could be the opportunity for change as long as he did not remain inactive.

Idle hands, and all that.

It’s a sense of duty that he has always carried inside him. He remembers being maybe thirteen years old or so, too young to really comprehend what was going on in the world around him, and still feeling this inexplicable burden, as though it was up to him to rebuild the entire universe himself. To repair something when he didn’t even understand how exactly it worked in the first place. He remembers endless nights spent lying in bed unable to sleep because he was too busy panicking about how the hell he was going to keep the cosmos from unravelling when everything seemed to be falling apart faster than anyone could possibly fix it.

Becoming Captain America had only served to intensify this feeling of responsibility into something of a compulsion. No longer was he just some rosy-cheeked idealist with all kinds of wacky aspirations but no ways of actually implementing them. Now, with the suit and the shield and the faith of a nation behind him, he had the means and therefore the obligation to act as that agent of change he’d always felt himself to be; it would have been a crime not to follow through with any of it.

Especially after it’d cost him the person who’d believed in him since the beginning.

Peggy had been the only one who knew the truth about why Steve had suddenly become so unstoppably determined to bring down HYDRA - it’s not like it wasn’t a thing on his to-do list before, but once he lost Bucky, it became the _only_ thing.

He let everyone believe he was fighting so hard purely out of righteousness, because it was What Captain America Would Do. He even tried to convince himself that that was his main motivator, but he knew himself better than that. Knew that what he was really looking for was a way to make it all worth it somehow. What good was it to be capable of so many wonders when he was unable to save his own best friend?

When he came out of the ice and was told that he saved the world, he thought that maybe it would finally feel like enough.

(It didn’t.)

He hadn’t saved shit. He was reminded of this every time he opened a history textbook. It was confusing, because in a way the world had made great strides from the way it had been in his day, but at the same time, a lot of the changes made seemed... not necessarily for the best.

Fury had said it only seemed so extreme to him because for him it was as if it’d all happened overnight. He told Steve that if he’d actually been around to witness the unraveling of the events leading up to this point, then maybe he’d be able to better understand why things were the way they were. Why people and governments react the way they do.

Steve sincerely doubted it, but had said nothing. Just threw himself further into his work, still desperate for that ever-elusive peace of mind.

“You’ve helped saved the world twice over,” Natasha once told him with a certain affectionate exasperation. “I think you can afford to cut yourself some fucking slack.”

He couldn’t, though. He couldn’t then, and he certainly cannot now.

 

* * *

 

Bucky has been gone for nearly an hour when Steve starts to get antsy. It isn’t like Bucky to be out on his own for more than thirty, forty-five minutes, and definitely not when he’s only a five minute drive away, picking up items on a fairly short shopping list.

The more time drags on, the worse the ideas in Steve’s head become. Maybe Bucky got confused again and took a wrong turn on the way home. Maybe there was a hold-up at the grocery store. Maybe HYDRA got their hands on him.

Maybe he’d left the house today fully intending not to return.

Steve picks up the phone.

He realises as it’s ringing that if he’s freaking out for no reason – which, the rational part of his mind tries to tell him, he probably is – it’s going to look like he’s being clingy again. To avoid giving that impression, he comes up with the rather clever plan (if he does say so himself) of disguising the true purpose of his call by making it sound as though he just thought of something he wants Bucky to buy while he’s out that wasn’t on the list.

Bucky picks up on the third ring.

“Steve?” he says. He sounds mildly puzzled and also a little out of breath.

Steve’s eyes flutter shut in pure relief and he fights to keep his voice casual as he says, “Hey, so, you – uh – you still at the store by any chance?”

“Wha—? Oh, no. Sorry. I left like ten minutes ago.”

Steve frowns. “Ten minutes ago? There a traffic jam or something?”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line before Bucky says, “...What?”

“It’s just... It usually only takes five minutes, tops, to drive home, doesn’t it?”

Another silence, longer than the first, then Bucky mutters, “Fuck.”

“Bucky?” Steve asks, perking up in concern. “What’s wrong?”

“I...” A quivering breath. “I drove to the store, didn’t I.”

It’s not a question. His voice is quiet, the words matted together with what sounds painfully like shame. Steve knows how embarrassed Bucky gets when he can’t remember stuff. Steve himself learned to not fret about it too much once he discovered what a common symptom it is, but he can’t help but to be rather troubled by it now. Bucky usually only forgets the smaller things that even ordinary people might lose track of every now and then, like what he had for breakfast that day or why he walked into a room; it’s just that with Bucky, it happens three times as often.

That he’d forgotten how he made it to the grocery store is a little more alarming.

“It’s okay, Buck,” Steve says as gently as he can, but Bucky doesn’t appear to be listening.

“Fuck,” he repeats, sounding more frantic now. “I— I-I have to go back. I gotta go... get the car... I’m sorry—”

“Listen, where are you right now? I can come meet you if you want. I’ll walk you home, then go get the car.”

“No, that— that’s stupid; you’d just be doubling back... I’ll go... I—”

Bucky’s words give way into hitching breaths and Steve knows he has to contain the situation before it gets out of control.

“Bucky,” he cuts in firmly, “Hey. Just breathe. It’s all right. It’s not a big deal. If anything, it’s good that you got a little exercise and fresh air, right?”

Bucky swallows audibly several times before he forces a tired, jagged-sounding laugh. “R-right.”

“I don’t mind coming to meet you, Buck. Where are you?”

“I’m, uh, coming up onto 18th Street.”

“Okay. Just sit tight. I’ll be there in a jiff.”

 

* * *

 

Bucky is a bit of a sorry sight when Steve finds him sitting at the corner of 18th and P, managing to look dejected and confused at the same time, clutching two bags of groceries to him with probably more force than necessary. He won’t look Steve in the eye, and Steve isn’t sure whether it’s out of shame or fear of punishment, but he doesn’t know what to do about either, and both add another volatile faultline to the perpetually splitting topography of his sternum.

Stuffing that feeling down along with the rest of them, Steve leans over to relieve Bucky of the grocery bags with one hand and help Bucky up with the other. Bucky rises slowly, uncertainly, like a newborn antelope, his hand strangely limp in Steve’s grasp, and once on his feet he just stands there staring blankly off into the distance.

“Buck,” Steve prods after a moment, concerned with how spacey Bucky seems to be. “You okay?”

Bucky’s head whips over to face him and he says abruptly, “Sorry.”

Then, in a smaller voice, something that sounds uncomfortably like _I’ll be good,_ which makes Steve’s blood run cold.

“What?” he asks, desperate to be told he’d heard wrong.

So desperate, in fact, that he just accepts it without questioning when Bucky replies, “I said ‘I’m good,’” because the alternative isn’t something Steve thinks he can handle right now.

The walk home is quiet, awkward. No matter how hard Steve tries to convince Bucky that he did well by going out on his own today, that today was a victory regardless of how it turned out in the end, Bucky won’t have any of it. He clams up stubbornly, and it’s never a good sign when Bucky shuts down like this.

That tight, tense, eggshell-walking feeling that Steve had been so guiltily relieved to be rid of when Bucky was gone has returned in full force.

Still, he resolves not to worry about it too much. Bucky has had a few good days in a row; their luck was bound to run out eventually. And just because he’s a little more scatterbrained than usual right now is not necessarily indicative of worse things to come. It’s just a hiccup. A bump in the road.

That’s what he tells himself, anyway.

 

* * *

 

It’s what he keeps telling himself as the week goes on, even though Bucky only seems to be getting more and more muddled. He’s developed a bunch of new, more troubling memory problems on top of his usual short-term ones. He keeps saying they should invite Natasha over when she’s been overseas for over a week now. One cloudy morning he starts making hamburgers because he thinks it’s evening and that it’s dinnertime. Steve often finds him wandering around the house staring at all the walls, the decor, the furniture, looking vaguely stunned, as if it’s the first time he’s seeing any of it.

Steve has no idea what to do. He isn’t even sure if there’s anything _wrong_ , per se, since these have actually been some of the least turbulent days in recent memory.

But he knows better than to think that simply because something is slow and quiet, it isn’t fatal.

Bucky looks the way Steve felt when he woke up from the ice. As if he’s still only existing on the barest minimum of functions required to sustain life. A reluctant heartbeat and the tired expanding and contracting of a pair of weary lungs. He moves as if he’s being dragged down by some invisible weight, having to fight against immeasurable pressure for every step, every inch, every _breath_.

He looks, Steve realises with a start, like he’s being erased.

It’s odd to watch a person disappear before your very eyes. And if Steve touches Bucky a little more often, holds him a little more tightly at night, it’s because all he can think about is his arm straining in vain to grab a hold of Bucky’s hand as the winter mountains roar past them, and he’ll be damned if he lets Bucky slip through his fingers again.

 

* * *

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter warning: the consent issues between bucky and steve become more pronounced, but there's nothing graphic. steve handles things in a less than stellar way, and we also start to see hints of bucky's internalised victim-blaming.

 

“Arctic terns migrate from the North Pole to the South Pole and back every year,” Steve says.

Says, “It’s not even just a straight up and down trip, either; they detour by thousands of miles to take advantage of certain wind currents.”

Steve says some other stuff, too. Maybe about Arctic terns, maybe about something else, but he only really tunes back into his own conversation when he hears himself telling Bucky, “I want to kiss you.”

He can’t seem to look Bucky in the eye, and the words don’t feel like his own somehow. Or rather, they don't feel like they are his to say, and he wonders why that is. Even yesterday night, when he was babbling all that ridiculous stuff to Bucky about love that he normally wouldn’t have been able to admit even just to himself, the words had felt natural and free, an extension of him, something meant to be shared instead of sealed up tightly inside.

It was an eruption that he couldn’t have contained even if he’d tried – once he’d opened his stupid damn mouth, he hadn’t been able to shut up. Not when it was something that had been struggling to break free for most of his life.

He can’t remember a time when he wasn’t carrying all that love around inside him.

Outwardly, he and Bucky had loved each other quietly. They’d been friends for so long that becoming something _more_ just seemed to be the logical next step, the natural evolution of something into its final, finest form. As such, there were never any dramatic, overt declarations of their affections or a sudden shift in dynamic; really the only thing different about their relationship was the way they'd now touch each other behind closed doors and drawn curtains, or, on those emboldened summer mornings after they’d been out all night, pressed up against the walls of abandoned buildings just before dawn. Aside from that, they were still the same two punk-ass friends they’d always been, exchanging playful touches and constant streams of good-natured insults. When times were rough, their love might have manifested itself a little more intensely, but at the same time it was also subtler and quieter than ever – they were two stoic, silent pillars bound in an unspoken agreement to keep the other standing.

How this all actually felt _inside_ was an entirely different story. The feelings Steve had – _has_ – for Bucky existed in a state of perpetual transformation, sometimes a quiet fever burning just beneath the surface, others the brazen blazing of a crackling neon sign that Steve was sure everyone in the world could see. But no matter what form those feelings took, they were always there, just as much a part of Steve’s baseline as his blood type and body temperature.

Steve never let Bucky know any of this, though. At least, not with words. It’s not that he'd never entertained the idea – god knows how many nights he’d spent wide awake in bed, wondering if he should tell Bucky everything. He’s not sure why he never did. Maybe he was afraid – once you release something that huge into the wild, it’s out there forever; there’s no way to reel it back in, to pretend it was never there. Or maybe it just seemed superfluous, because it’s not like Bucky didn’t already know that Steve loved him, so getting all sappy about it didn’t seem entirely necessary.

In the end, though, it probably all came down to that shortsighted sense of invincibility unique to youth that convinces you time is an ally forever on your side and as such, you will always get another chance to say what needs to be said.

Steve certainly feels foolish for having let himself fall for that one. Between his own recurring health scares to the loss of his mother to the deaths of so many good men on the battlefield, he knew better than most the impermanence of life, how quickly and unfairly someone can be torn away from you. Then again, perhaps it was that very knowledge that kept him silent: having lived with so much loss around him, he needed to be able to believe that there was something – _anything_ – that would be accompanying him into the future, and if he harboured it safely inside of himself, not speaking a word of it to a single soul, then the world wouldn’t know to rob it from him.

(How hilarious, then, that he woke up in in the future accompanied by none, having stayed dead silent but still ended up being robbed of absolutely everything.)

Right up until the moment the iron bar gave way beneath Bucky’s weight, Steve thought, _I’ll tell him soon._

He’d convinced himself he was just waiting for the right time. After the war, maybe. They could get a nice brownstone in Brooklyn and Steve would confess just how deeply his love for Bucky truly ran, and Bucky would no doubt roll his eyes and say something like, “Yeah, I know, ya dumb sap,” and Steve knows Bucky well enough to know that this meant _Me too_.

 

* * *

  

The way this scene _actually_ ends up turning out – last night, in the dark, tentative whispers over the staccato beat of two bursting hearts – was not exactly what Steve had in mind, but neither was it any of the worst case scenarios that Steve had partially conjured up in his brain.

To the contrary, Bucky hadn’t appeared to be repulsed or scared away by any of it. He expressed a heartbreaking bewilderment when it came to the concept of being loved, but as far as Steve could tell, it hadn’t completely freaked him out or anything. He’d seemed almost... curious. And god, what Steve wouldn’t do to be the one to teach Bucky everything he needs to know about being loved and cared for.

Steve can tell it’s still weighing heavily on Bucky’s mind the next morning, to the point where Bucky even brings it up for discussion, unprompted.

Even though he warns Steve that he may never be able to love him back in the way that Steve wants, he still says, “I could try to be more. To be... _him_.”

And for all Steve’s big talk that he doesn’t care that Bucky isn’t the same man he knew in 1945, there is not a single part of him that does not bloom with an irrepressible hope at those words, because though it was not a lie when he said that the fact that Bucky is alive at all is good enough for him, it _would_ be a lie if he claimed he never wished that things could go back to the way they used to be.

“I do want it,” Bucky insists.

Which is how Steve finds himself saying, “Can I kiss you?” and the words still don’t feel quite right, but then Bucky’s lips are on his and they’re not quite right either, but certainly not _wrong_. There’s a hunger to Bucky’s kiss that Steve doesn’t think he’s ever tasted before, a wild, gulping desperation, as if he’s been missing this as much as Steve has. Steve eventually ends up staggering back a few steps beneath the force of it all, eyes wide and wet, breath coming in almost embarrassingly audible gasps.

Bucky looks shellshocked for a split-second before his face breaks into its old easy grin and he makes a snide comment about how long it must have been since Steve last kissed someone. It’s such a _Bucky_ thing to say, and Steve could sob in tremulous relief because this is the first familiar thing he’s felt in years.

 

* * *

 

Bucky is quiet for the next couple of days, and Steve lets him be. He keeps his distance, allowing Bucky to process it all. If this is going to happen again between them, Steve needs to know that Bucky is in it because he wants to be, not because he thinks he _should_. So he lets Bucky have as much time and space as he needs to figure things out and doesn’t dare say a word lest he end up swaying Bucky’s decision in any way.

In the meantime, he replays their kiss over and over again in his head – it’s the first thing in his mind when he wakes up, the last before he sleeps and the only one when he’s coming into his own hand in the shower, shuddering and soundless and sick with guilt, because it feels like a violation, almost - to be thinking of his friend in this way when Bucky is in no state to be viewed as a sexual being just yet.

Bucky opens their next conversation by saying, “The person you love...-d... It’s not... I’m not him.”

Steve swallows hard. This isn’t exactly how he was hoping things would play out.

“I know,” he says carefully.

“But... you still... love... me...” Bucky states, the words coming out slow and stilted as he struggles to work through the available data.

“Yes,” Steve replies simply.

He studies Bucky’s expression. There’s no ill-will harshening the fine lines of his features, just the anxious confusion that Steve has become all too accustomed to seeing on Bucky’s face when he’s baffled by the simplest of human kindnesses.

Sure enough, Bucky frowns and says, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Steve just gives an uncomfortable shrug. “I know. I can’t explain it, either, to be honest. I just... I just know it’s true.”

It’s shit reasoning, Steve is fully willing to admit it, but reason has never played a particularly important role in his decision-making, or arguably in his life in general. His emotions tend to come first. He builds his rationale around _them_ , not the other way around, then proceeds to discreetly factor his feelings out of the equation so it looks like he’d been being sensible the entire time.

He’s gotten pretty good at justifying things to himself by using this method.

Bucky seems to think about this for a long time before at last he looks Steve in the eye and says, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Steve repeats, sounding oddly short of breath. “Okay...?”

“It’s okay that you love me even though it doesn’t make sense,” Bucky clarifies, and Steve isn’t sure if he means it doesn’t make sense for Steve to love him because he’s not the same guy he was, or if it doesn’t make sense that _anyone_ would love him at all. The latter possibility is too sad, so Steve decides he’ll stick to the former, but either way, he’s just relieved that he now seems to have Bucky’s ‘permission’ to feel the way he does about him.

“It’s also okay if you don’t – or _can’t_ – love me back,” Steve chimes in, trying to sound a lot more sure of himself than he actually is. Because while it’s true that he’ll take whatever incarnation of Bucky he can get, with whatever feelings he may or may not have for Steve, it doesn’t mean it still won’t hurt to know that their exchange of affections no longer goes both ways.

Still, he’s not that concerned, because even if they can’t go back to being the kinds of lovers they’d been in the past, there are so many countless other ways to love a person; he’s sure they’ll be able to figure something out.

“I want to, though,” Bucky admits in a whisper so tiny that Steve almost misses it.

“Sorry, what was that?”

Bucky clears his throat but keeps his eyes to the floor as he repeats, with only slightly more conviction, “I want to be able to... to love you. The way I used to. I- I don’t really remember how it worked, but... I remember how it felt. It felt... good. Warm. Safe.”

There’s a long pause, then Bucky lets out a bit of a snort and says, “God, listen to me. I sound like I walked out of a bad romance novel.”

“You _look_ like you did, too,” Steve teases, reaching over to brush a strand of dark hair from his forehead and placing his other palm on Bucky’s chiselled cheek. The way Bucky leans into his hand, practically melting into its warmth, has Steve feeling more tentatively hopeful than he has in a long, long time.

 

* * *

 

The hope doesn’t last.

Even though they are touching and kissing and holding each other more often than ever, Steve just can’t shake the sense that Bucky is slipping away from him somehow. He has that disappearing feeling about him again, as if Bucky is losing substance like the kid in that movie with the time-travelling Delorean.

Steve doesn’t understand it. This is about as close to their old relationship as they’ve been able to come, so why does it still feel like he’s losing the fight?

So Steve does the only thing he knows how to do – he fights harder.

He tries all the things that used to soothe Bucky when they were younger. The little jabs that could make him smile even after a horrible day at work. The tender touches that brought him back to the present when Steve would find him writhing whimpering in his foxhole, murmuring his rank and serial number through chattering teeth.

A gentle kiss on the nose. Playing with the strands of his hair on the nape of his neck. Curling up together at night with Steve’s strong, protective arms wrapped around his torso to remind him that no one will ever be able to get their hands on him again.

The way Bucky’s normally tightrope-taut figure goes boneless beneath the silent language of their bodies murmuring warm reassurances in the dark must mean it’s doing him some good.

 

* * *

 

For the fourth time this week and second time this night, Steve is woken up by the shifting of the mattress as Bucky gets out of bed at some ungodly hour, and Steve knows the reason for his departure without having to look. He waits a moment, hoping that if Bucky is able to complete at least the first bit of his routine perimeter check, it might be easier to coax him back into bed because he’ll have already seen for himself that there is no threat.

After hearing Bucky unlocking and then locking the front door several times before moving on to the windows, Steve decides he’s waited long enough. He swallows down the sadness that’s crawling up the back of his throat and goes to find Bucky, making sure to make enough noise to warn him of his approach.

He discovers Bucky in the living room, inspecting the locks on the windows. It’s a sight that’s become all too familiar in recent days, but every time it still sends the aching anvil of Steve’s heart in a cold steel plummet down his ribcage like an elevator with the cables cut.

He knows Bucky is aware of his presence because he freezes up.

“Bucky,” Steve calls out softly from the doorway.

Bucky turns away from Steve to face the wall.

“You’re safe, Buck,” Steve promises him, struggling to keep the waver out of his words. “I swear it. The apartment is secure. We got the Avengers on speed dial. And S.H.I.E.L.D. are tracking down HYDRA as we speak, picking them off like the vermin they are.”

Bucky continues to stare at the wall.

“You know,” Steve continues awkwardly, “We could— I mean, if you ever wanted... We could go after them, too. HYDRA, I mean. With S.H.I.E.L.D., or just on our own.”

This is the first time that Steve has dared to bring this up. He knows how complex the situation is, and though he hopes that Bucky will one day want to take control by seeking retribution or reparations of some kind, he recognises that this decision must come from Bucky and Bucky alone. For once, this is not Steve’s war to fight, no matter how desperately he may want to.

Finally, Bucky turns to look at him, confusion plainly etched onto his face.

“Why would I want to do that?” he asks.

“I don’t know, I just thought it might... help. Give you some peace of mind or whatever. Knowing that they can’t touch you anymore. Knowing that you gave them what they fucking deserved.”

Bucky seems stunned into silence by the sudden intensity in Steve’s words. Steve hadn’t intended to blurt out that last part. If he were a better man, he’d say it was a matter of justice. Of not letting the bad guys get away with it. But he knows better than to believe that his desire to go after HYDRA comes out of anything but pure, selfish vindictiveness.

Because Steve wants HYDRA to pay. To _burn_. He wants to track down every tech, scientist and soldier that had ever hurt Bucky – either directly or by turning a blind eye – and he wants to make them suffer the way they’d made Bucky suffer for seventy fucking years.

Steve just can't help how _personal_  anything becomes whenever Bucky is involved in any way.

Steve had joined the army not to kill people – obviously that was going to be an unfortunate inevitability, but he would receive no pleasure in doing it – but to stop bullies. Some of the older, grizzlier soldiers in his unit told him killing would get easier with time, but it never did for Steve. The men on the other side of the battlefield were still exactly that to him – men. Hell, sometimes they were mere boys. And try as he may, Steve could never keep himself from wondering about them, dumb stuff like how they took their coffee, or if they’d ever seen the ocean, or whether they had a dame back home or brothers or sisters or a pet dog who wouldn’t understand why his master left and never came back.

“You can’t make it so damn personal,” someone had told him. (Steve can’t remember who anymore, and this makes him sad.)

That soldier had been wrong, though. Things weren’t personal. Not yet.

Not until HYDRA took Bucky from him for the first time.

And _that’s_ when it started to get personal.

That’s when Steve led himself on a one-man mission deep into enemy territory to rescue Bucky, who, by all accounts, was probably already dead, but unless that claim came with a corpse, then Steve would be having none of it.

Then Bucky fell and things _really_ got personal.

It was goodbye _I just want to stop bullies_ and hello _these fuckers need to pay for what they did and I will stop at nothing to ensure that happens_.

It frightens him sometimes, just how black and white things are for him when it comes to Bucky. The spectrum of Steve’s morality might have acquired many more shades of grey ever since waking up in the new millenium, but the one thing that has remained a matter of all or nothing is _Bucky._

All: Steve's almost bloodthirsty determination to take down an entire Nazi organisation for what they’d done to his best friend.

Nothing: him dropping his shield into the Potomac and letting that metal fist rearrange his face because if Bucky still couldn’t remember him, then frankly Steve would rather just disappear into the Potomac, too.

As far as Steve is concerned, there is either a world with both of them in it, or there is no world at all. He is completely aware of how unhealthy this kind of thinking is, but believes he is entitled to a bit of slack considering Bucky is literally the only relic of his world that he has left.

“Revenge doesn’t seem like a very Captain America thing to do,” Bucky points out after a moment.

“This Captain America you speak of _was_ a member of a team called the _Avengers_ ,” Steve reminds him with a humourless smile.

Bucky manages a bit of a snorting chuckle at that, but once the laughter’s faded, his face goes all closed-off and expressionless. Steve frowns, unsettled by Bucky’s unresponsiveness. He knows that Bucky is far less prone to the kinds of hotheaded kneejerk reactions that Steve has the tendency to fall back on, but he’d thought that Bucky would exhibit at least _some_ kind of response to the chance to face his demons head-on. Hell, even _fear_ would be less troubling than the abject indifference that Bucky is displaying right now, blank-eyed and dulled-over, body slack with a defeated resignation. It’s as if he’s simply accepted that this is the way things are or, worse, that he does not value himself enough to be outraged over what had been done to him.

This sends a burst of protective fury flaring through Steve’s entire body, as if he has to make up for Bucky’s lack of a reaction by doubling his own.

“Aren’t you angry about what they did to you?” he demands before he can stop himself, because he needs to know – he _needs_ Bucky to be furious, because at least that would mean Bucky understands that what happened to him was wrong.

The bewilderment is back on Bucky’s face. “Should I be…?”

 _“Yes,_ for fuck’s sake!” Steve practically shouts, unable to keep a lock on his emotions any longer, all the grief and rage that he’s been bottling up for so long finally beginning to seep out. “Buck... They stole your entire life from you. They made you suffer so badly, and- and even though they’re gone now, you’re _still_ suffering. God, it makes me so angry I can’t even see straight.”

“Well, when you put it like _that_ …” Bucky says dryly, rolling his eyes, and normally Steve revels in any signs that Bucky is on his way back to being his usual sarcastic self, but right now, his seeming irreverence is anything but comforting.

“Bucky...” he chokes out, suddenly struck by a horrifying thought that had not occurred to him until this very moment, “You... you know what they did to you was wrong, don’t you?”

Bucky just shrugs. “Sure. I mean, I guess. It was... pretty fucked-up. But they did what they had to do.”

Steve stares uncomprehendingly at the emptiness in Bucky’s face and he feels like he’s been punched. Is this really what Bucky believes? That what they did to him was _necessary?_ That there isn't anything _wrong_ about it?

Steve thinks he’s been holding up pretty well, all things considered, but these new revelations about Bucky's mindset have Steve deeply rattled in a way that he hasn’t been since he’d read the old HYDRA files. He’d figured that ridding Bucky of HYDRA’s programming was just a matter of showing him that he’s allowed to make his own decisions; getting him to stop interpreting everything as an order; teaching him to take care of his own body. In that respect, Bucky had freed himself of most – if not _all_ – of his old conditioning.

Or so Steve thought.

What Steve hadn’t realised was just how deeply HYDRA’s programming truly runs. That because they were unable to make Bucky into a true machine, they’d had to break him down as a man.

Physical and psychological abuse could only go so far (especially on someone as resilient as Bucky, Steve thinks with a sad sort of pride). They’d needed something a little more... refined... to take care of the nuances that traditional torture lacked the finesse to handle, and _that_ was the factor that Steve had so grossly underestimated. The possibility that HYDRA’s manipulation of Bucky’s mind and body extended far beyond a metal arm and a few trigger phrases. That their claim over him was so absolute, there was not a single part of him that they did not own. They had hollowed him out, uprooted and reseeded his entire belief system, and warped his sense of self-perception until the only form of identity and self-worth he knew was whatever HYDRA had him believe.

Once Steve realises this, he is disgusted by his own naïveté; _of course_ HYDRA’s control over Bucky would have had to be all-encompassing for the Winter Soldier to work. He was a weapon. An attack dog. They couldn’t afford to have him misfiring or turning on his handlers.

“They did what they had to do,” Bucky repeats, sounding slightly confused, like he’s reciting something he’d been told a long time ago, before he knew what any of it meant.

“They...” Steve begins, before trailing off again. He knows he’s walking on thin ice right now – if he pushes too far, touches upon any one of the countless conversational trip wires that lay tangled up in the pathways of Bucky’s brain, Bucky will shut down and disappear into bedroom for hours, but on bad weeks, he sometimes doesn't come out for days. Right now, Steve is torn between ending the conversation for both of their sakes, or trying to wheedle out as much information as he can during this rare moment of openness so that he can have a better idea of what’s going on in Bucky’s head.

Steve takes a deep breath and says, “They did what they had to do... to do what, exactly?”

“To keep me operational,” Bucky replies vacantly.

“Jesus Christ,” Steve mutters to himself, bringing a hand to his forehead to shield his pain-clenched eyes, struggling not to react too strongly lest he set Bucky off.

Sure enough, Bucky is watching him with the nervous vigilance of a prey animal, so Steve quickly says, “I’m not mad at you, Buck. I’m... ugh. Fuck. I’m mad at _them_. I’m fucking _furious._  But... you’re telling me you aren’t... You don’t feel _anything_ towards those sick bastards?”

He’s pushing Bucky. Probably too hard. He knows this. He’s doing something that he should absolutely not be doing, but he simply cannot accept that Bucky doesn’t feel a single ounce of emotion towards the people responsible for having made his existence a living hell. Bucky should be angry. Maybe upset. At the very least distressed. _Anything_ to indicate that he doesn’t just think this is something he deserves.

But Bucky is not angry. He’s not upset or distressed. He isn’t anything at all.

“Bucky?” Steve says desperately, trying to provoke any kind of reaction, but Bucky simply presses his lips together into a tight, unhappy line in the way that Steve has come to learn means the conversation is over.

 

* * *

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i apologise for the long wait between chapters. and the super-late comment replies. and the lack of tumblr activity. and i haven't even gotten around to catching up on reading any fic yet D:
> 
> things have just been really difficult irl these past few weeks, ~~but hopefully when this all blows over i can start being more involved with fandomthings again.~~
> 
> **edit:** on mini-hiatus. sorry, and thank you for bearing with me :(


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the long wait for this chapter (and its admittedly less-than-desirable quality). it comes off a long stretch of writer's block and some not-so-good times irl. just trying to get the hang of things again. hope you still enjoy it :S
> 
> (also, you can yell at [sihayax](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sihayax/pseuds/sihayax) for providing the devastating idea of steve crying alone in his car ok don't blame me i am an innocent party in this situation)

 

Bucky is disappearing.

Steve doesn’t pick up on this immediately, though, because for a long time, all he can see is their relationship becoming more and more similar to the one they’d had before the war. It’s obviously not exactly the same – _and it never will be,_ Steve keeps forcing himself to remind himself, swallowing hard around the sorrow-snarl knotted in his throat – but it’s enough.

It’s enough to run his fingers through Bucky’s hair as he comforts him. It’s enough to be able to kiss Bucky not just on the lips but also on the nose, the forehead, the cheek, the very edge of his mouth. It’s using his own body to shield Bucky’s with the kind of security that no vibranium disc could ever provide.

Every now and then, a tiny nagging voice at the back of his head murmurs that maybe he’s moving a little too quickly, but he is just so unspeakably relieved to finally be able to use his most powerful tool – his body, his hands – to create for Bucky these safe spaces of love and companionship and protection that mere words could never hope to properly convey.

But not even Steve’s so starry-eyed that he doesn’t notice something just isn’t quite right.

Bucky is extraordinarily passive, almost _submissive,_ in his all physical interactions with Steve. He never takes the lead, and instead always opts to just go along with whatever Steve initiates. Back when they were younger, it had been a much more balanced affair, each of them reaching for and away from the other in relatively equal measures. Now, however, it’s all Steve. He doesn’t necessarily mind this, though. Especially when he reminds himself that it’s likely because Bucky is still learning how to express himself, so Steve figures he’ll just continue to lead the way until Bucky feels comfortable enough to start making the first move himself.

Still, something’s just not adding up.

Though they seem to have made impressive progress in terms of how they’ve been able to reintroduce physical contact into their relationship, Bucky himself seems to be... breaking, literally fracturing before his eyes, which Steve doesn’t understand at all.

He thought that this was where it would start to get easier, or at least, less excruciatingly difficult. He truly did believe that them being able to touch each other like this was a crucial milestone of some sort, that maybe things would get better from here on out. They’d worked their way past one of the most challenging obstacles, so now everything else should slowly start to fall into place, right?

To Steve’s credit, he’s partially right, in that things do begin to fall.

Except that thing is Bucky.

And he is falling out of sight.

Again.

Steve watches all of it with a certain bewildered, frantic helplessness – Bucky is literally right here with him, closer than he’s ever been, Steve can reach out and hold onto Bucky’s hand; reel him in by the mouth for a kiss to confirm that there is still breath coming out from between those lips; he can even curl himself around Bucky’s body to make sure that nobody else can lay a hand on him; – so why does it still feel so much like Bucky is disappearing into some place where Steve cannot follow?

Steve _needs_ to be able to follow. He can’t lose Bucky again. Can’t _fail_ him again.

People can tell him a thousand times over that it wasn’t his fault. And they have told him as much. Peggy, with her unflinching conviction; Natasha, drowsy from blood loss, but sounding more honest than Steve had ever heard her be. Hell, even Bucky himself has repeatedly assured Steve that he doesn’t blame him for anything.

These are all moot points to Steve, though. The fact that nobody blames him for what happened does not change the fact that it _was_ his fault.

That’s why losing Bucky now... It would destroy Steve, even worse than the first time, from which he’d only ‘recovered’ in a purely physical sense, and through no real choice of his own. He hadn’t asked to be brought back. To be 'saved.' His Arctic tomb _had_ been his salvation, but they’d wrenched him right out of it, threw him into a life he did not want, in a world that had no use for him, and then expected him to be grateful.

(When he’d told Fury that they should’ve just left it at the bottom of the ocean, he hadn’t just been referring to the Tesseract.)

Living felt like not-living. Existing, he supposes, would be a better word. He felt like he was drifting through a void, perpetually scrambling for a hold on something – _anything_ – that might make it a little easier to stay. Because the truth was, for the first couple of years at least, there was absolutely nothing keeping him here aside from that ever-present sense of responsibility and obligation that he hadn't been able to shake off even in death.

He often found himself wondering what would happen to him when that was no longer enough.

He’d come dangerously close to figuring out the fatal answer to that question; would’ve gotten even nearer still if it hadn’t been for Natasha and her continued dogged attempts to get him out into the world. She refused to let him hole himself up in his apartment for days on end as he picked away at wounds that everyone seemed to forget were still so very painfully fresh for him.

Within the span of a few years, he’d lost his best friend, died, woke up nearly seven decades later, fought some aliens, joined the ranks of a morally questionable spy and intelligence agency, but he hadn’t had any time to process what had happened, let alone to grieve and begin to rebuild. 

But now, with Bucky back, Steve thinks he finally has something to hold on to. He can start looking toward the future again, instead of always having one foot planted in the past, because he won’t be facing it alone anymore.

(So why does he still feel like he’s mourning someone who is still alive?)

A detached, objective part of Steve realises just how fucked-up and unhealthy it is (he supposes a more accurate term would be ‘dependent,’ but that’s a word he’s never allowed himself to use, so he’s not about to start now) to be pinning so much of his own wellbeing onto one person – a person who is in no state whatsoever to be able to support someone else – and he knows it’s certainly not fair to Bucky himself, but Steve simply can’t fucking help it.

Bucky has always been, for better or for worse, his lifeline, and he’s fraying at both ends.

 

* * *

 

Not knowing what else to do, Steve tries to talk about it, despite having an approximately zero percent success rate on all his previous attempts.

Bucky’s posturing and expression immediately shift from tensed-up to way-too-casual. To his credit, his smile hardly wavers at the edges as he says, “Aww, c'mon. You worry too much, Steve.”

Both heartache and frustration tighten in Steve’s chest at Bucky’s obvious attempt to derail the conversation. Bucky doesn’t want to admit that he’s hurting, all right, Steve can understand that. God knows how many times Steve had wheezed he was fine even through fluid-filled lungs and a triple-digit fever.

Steve is pretty sure it’s not the same thing, though. Because not only does Bucky constantly deny anything’s wrong, he also refuses all people’s attempts to help him. He won’t talk to anyone. Not Steve, not even Sam. Therapy is still out of the question. Sometimes it seems like Bucky doesn’t even care about trying to help _himself -_ lately it’s been getting harder and harder to get him to eat everything on his plate, or to go to bed on time, or all sorts of other little things that seem so goddamn simple.

What’s more, Steve has recently been plagued with this sinking, sneaking suspicion that there’s something else bothering Bucky, even though Bucky has yet to even so much as hint at anything of the sort. Having been taught by HYDRA that his needs always took the backseat to the mission as long as it did not affect his performance, Bucky still has difficulty verbalising his own pain or distress, so if indeed there is anything wrong, Steve is going to have to be the one to uncover what it is.

He hates to admit it, but he’s so _tired_ of this. Of constantly having to play detective trying to solve the mystery of What’s Eating Bucky Barnes. It’s draining enough just getting Bucky through his tough days, but combine that with the additional stress of not even knowing what’s wrong in the first place and having to overanalyse Bucky’s every single word or action to try and figure it out, then it’s just fucking exhausting.

“I just wish you would talk to me,” he tells Bucky despairingly, trying not to let the edge of frustration scrape into his tone. “I’m not a mind-reader, Buck. I can’t– I don’t know how to fix this if I don’t know what’s—”

“That what I am to you, then?” Bucky bites out with a pinch of acrid laughter. “Something to be _fixed?_ A little pet-project?”

Steve pinches the bridge of his nose as he clenches his eyes shut in exasperation. He probably should have been wiser in his word selection – semantics can be a matter of life or death to Bucky when he’s in a state of exaggerated response like this – but there are so many countless tripwires to be avoided that it’s impossible to keep track of them all.

“I don’t mean to fix _you,”_ Steve says tersely, fighting to keep patient. “I mean fix whatever’s... you know... going on.”

“Nothing’s going on,” is Bucky’s predictable reply.

“C’mon, Bucky. I know you. I _know_ you. Well enough to know when something’s bothering you.”

Bucky’s overdefensive demeanor eases up until he’s a sad loose jumble of limbs and blankets on the couch, eyes cast downwards to avoid meeting Steve’s gaze.

“You _knew_ me,” he corrects Steve quietly, sending seismic aches shuddering across Steve’s sternum.

Steve forces himself to let the use of the past tense slide and he says, “All right, fine, so maybe I don’t know you like I used to... But that’s all the more reason we gotta communicate, Bucky! You’ve already told me that you trust me, and I- I promise... I _swear to you_ , I would never be angry with you for anything, or- or use it against you in any way—”

“I know you wouldn’t,” Bucky cuts in, fretfully fiddling his fingers. “It’s just... I don’t know what’s wrong. When do I _ever_ know? I’m just... I’m like this for no reason a lot of the time, and I hate it as much as you do, okay?”

Steve exhales sharply, suddenly stricken with guilt. Here he’d been so inwardly angry at Bucky for not opening up to him about what was troubling him; he should have figured that Bucky himself probably didn’t know anything more than he did. And if Steve is already this frightened and frustrated by the lack of answers and explanations, then how must Bucky himself be feeling, with his brain constantly turning on him without warning?

“It’s okay, Steve,” Bucky says after a moment. His voice doesn’t sound like his own. “I mean... It never lasts, right? It’ll be okay. Right?”

Steve thinks about arguing but ultimately he just lays a hand on Bucky’s forearm and concedes, “Yeah. R-right. Of course it will.”

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t.

With each day that passes, Steve feels more and more like he’s a kite being flung helplessly along on the gale winds of Bucky’s turbulent moods. There are days that are ugly and tempestuous, and days that are blanketed by an insidious calm. Others are a thrash of whiplash as Bucky careens through terror and blankness and everything in between. Either way, every morning Steve wakes up not knowing what incarnation of Bucky Barnes he will be facing today, and the stress of being so deeply and continuously immersed in such a volatile situation is finally starting to take its toll in ways that even Steve cannot keep under wraps.

To his horror, Steve finds himself coming up with more and more excuses to leave the house. Buys less grocery items at a time so he has to go shopping more often. Goes for takeout instead of having delivery. Takes more jogs, spends more time at the gym, the library, or, when he’s feeling brave enough, the VA.

Anywhere to escape that constant choking feeling of dread that hangs thick in their apartment’s air and drenches the walls of every room.

Whenever Steve sets foot on the sidewalk, it’s like he can breathe again, and he hates himself for it. Hates himself for the utter sense of relief that saturates his entire body, though perhaps it’s not relief so much as it’s _release_. A chance to finally unleash all the emotions he’s had to bottle up for Bucky’s sake.

Sometimes when he leaves the house, he doesn’t even go anywhere in particular, just gets behind the steering wheel of his parked car, and weeps like a child.

 

* * *

 

“He’s getting worse,” Steve tells Natasha over coffee one afternoon.

She decimates the delicate foam art in her latte with several stabs of her stirring stick and says, “It’s not linear, Rogers.”

“I know that,” Steve replies brusquely. “He’s just... He won’t tell me what’s wrong. He won’t let anyone try to help.”

“Could be he doesn’t even _know_ what’s wrong,” Natasha suggests. “It’s really hard to pinpoint the exact cause of certain things. Sometimes there isn’t one at all.”

“Yeah,” Steve mutters distractedly, “Yeah, that’s what he said, but... I just- I don’t... I... Okay, this might sound crazy, but I swear, something’s just... off. I’ve never seen him like this, not even in the beginning. His moods and reactions are all over the place. He’s always on edge, to the point of paranoia. I’ve had to hide all the knives in the house because it’s been twice now that the house has creaked and Bucky freaked the fuck out, grabbed the first knife he could reach, and hurled it halfway through the wall.”

Natasha takes a sip of her coffee and shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “Steve, I can’t... There isn’t really anything I can do about this...”

Steve inhales shakily as he puts his face in his hands, elbows propped up on the table.

“I know, I’m sorry,” he says in a muffled voice. “Fuck, look at me... I- I invite you out for a nice coffee date, to unwind, have a laugh or two, but I just... god...”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Natasha says gently. “I just don’t want you to think that I have some kind of miracle fix-it advice I can give you. I can listen. I can be here for you. That’s all. And that’s what you can do for him.”

“There has to be more,” Steve whispers helplessly, raising his head again to stare Natasha in the eye, bleary wet blue meeting polished indestructible green.

There is a grim set to Natasha’s jaw as she says, “You’re doing everything you can, Rogers.”

“No, I—”

“What more, then?” Natasha demands, a sudden fierceness to her voice. “What more could you possibly be doing that you aren’t already?”

Steve thinks for a moment before he surrenders with a heavy sigh. “Nothing, I guess.”

 

* * *

 

Steve is careful to steer the conversation through safer waters after that, and returns home actually feeling a little bit lighter. He still holds his breath as he turns the key to their apartment, unsure of what state Bucky might be in – he’d been fine when Steve left, and Steve was only gone for an hour, but he knows all too well how quickly things can deteriorate – but upon entering the building, he is relieved to find Bucky just sitting in the living room, quietly reading a book.

He raises his eyes when he sees Steve walk in, forces a tired smile.

“Good read?” Steve asks, nodding to the original German-language copy of _Der Steppenwolf_.

Bucky shrugs. “I think. I don’t know. I’ve been reading the same three lines for the last fifteen minutes.”

Steve makes a concerned sound, but Bucky just ploughs right ahead and asks, “So how’s Natalia doing?”

“Good,” Steve replies neutrally. “She’s heading out again next week.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D. stuff?”

“Natasha stuff.”

“Ah.”

Things continue relatively smoothly for the rest of the day, with Bucky being surprisingly productive. He cooks a hearty pot roast for dinner. Starts working on a new knitting pattern. Does a load of laundry. Steve knows better than to think this peace will last, but he at least allows himself to breathe.

Wrong choice.

All the air he’s ever taken into his body is sucked right out when, just before lights-out, Bucky says out of nowhere, “I think I should go.”

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for sticking with this story, for putting up with me, for being so unremittingly thoughtful and patient and kind. please feel free to hit me up on [tumblr](http://www.wolveroonie.tumblr.com) if you ever need to talk about anything at all ♥


End file.
